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Monday, May 30, 2016

Carlota Caulfieldis a poet, translator and literary critic. she is
the author of eleven collections of poetry, including At the Paper Gates
with Burning Desire, The Book of Giulio Camillo (a model for a theater of
memory), El libro de Giulio Camillo (maqueta para un teatro de la memoria) / Il
Libro de Giulio Camillo (modello per un teatro della memoria), Movimientos metálicos
para juguetes abandonados (First Hispanoamerican Poetry Prize “Dulce María
Loynaz”, Spain-Cuba 2002),Quincunce / Quincunx, Ticket to Ride. Essays and Poems, A Mapmaker’s
Diary: Selected Poemsand Fashionable. Una poeta adicta a la moda. Her poetry has appeared in literary
journals in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

She has also translated the American writer Jack
Foley, and the Irish poets Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní
Dhomhnaill, Rita Ann Higgins, Paula Meehan, Medbh McGuckian, Sara Berkeley and
Catherine Walsh. In addition, she has translated a number of Hispanic poets
into English.

About CUADERNO NEUMEISTER / THE NEUMEISTER NOTEBOOK

A collection of poems in Spanish with facing-page English translations by Mary G Berg in collaboration with the poet.

Carlota Caulfield’s poems are detailed observations of an inner music
that is constantly created by listening and looking: “You enter the
forest. / You follow the night’s path.” This inner music is, as
Caulfield puts it (“su materia contra mi materia”), “jazzable.” To the
self-referencing poet, the “I” is “you” and shifts as it encounters
experience. Boundaries blur in this rich morphing of “the soul’s grottos
and…lonely tunnels,” “as if you, suddenly, were to multiply yourself.”
For the reader as for the writer, The Neumeister Notebook offers us the
rare opportunity not only to live beyond our skins but “to live
beyond…understanding.” It is a phenomenology of wonder, a journey to the
things themselves and back again as “outer” becomes “inner,” Spanish
becomes English, and world becomes spirit: “Stray notes. / Listen to
them.”

The poetic numen that moves about this Neumeister Notebook seeks to
embody and acquire a voice by recording intimately the creative
experience of other artists (musicians, painters, writers, builders)
with whom it finds the most dissimilar—though not openly
revealed—affinities or complicities of life: islands, exiles... The
author, Carlota Caulfield, a unique voice within current Cuban poetry,
delivers here her daily living of artistic creation, which allows her,
at the end of the book, to transform into poetry the most everyday
objects around her: a tureen, a fruit bowl, a lamp. Moved by the human
bond implicit in all translation, she translates other arts in her
art—or her art in other arts—, other lives in her life—or her life in
other lives—, and, intrinsically, physical things in bodies of poetic
and sensual spirituality.

— Jesús J. Barquet

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Carlota Caulfield finds a simple everyday act of sipping a cup of coffee or eating a croissant gives inspiration. At the same time, the nothingness of one's ownself –“you're the nothing of your other self”--finds inspiration in diverse sources such as jazz, theater, art, photography, architecture, film and literature. In En Cuaderno Neumeister / The Neumeister Notebook, the voices of memory play as masterfully in poems that explore intimate topics as they play in poems more abstract and philosophical. Under a surrealist waterfall of her dreams, Carlota Caulfield soaks up vibrant images and delivers the reader a singularly modern work.